Putting up a page after being made redundant

The day it happens, a website is the last thing on your mind, and it should be. There's a severance letter to read twice, a laptop to hand back, health insurance to figure out, and usually a few hours of just sitting with it before you're fit to make decisions about anything, let alone information architecture. If someone tells you to spend that first day building a personal page, ignore them. That is not the job the day has for you.

But there is a narrower, more useful version of the advice, and it has a deadline attached that most people don't realize is running. For roughly two weeks after a layoff, the people who know you are actively thinking about you — not because they're especially generous, but because you're freshly top of mind. A former manager mentions over lunch that their old report is on the market. A colleague sees a role posted internally and thinks of you before they think of anyone else. Someone forwards your name to a friend who's hiring, mostly because the conversation happened to come up. None of that requires you to ask for it. It happens on its own, for a while, and then it stops, because two months from now you are no longer the thing anyone is thinking about — they've moved on to their own week, and being forwarded starts requiring you to actively ask rather than simply exist in someone's peripheral vision. The window where this happens without effort is short, and it is closing from the moment you're told.

What a page does inside that window is small but specific: it gives the person who's about to say your name somewhere to point. "You should talk to Sarah, here's her site" is a sentence people will actually say. "You should talk to Sarah, she doesn't really have anything online" is a sentence that gets abbreviated to nothing, because most people won't type out a LinkedIn search on your behalf mid-conversation. The page isn't doing the persuading — the person forwarding you is doing that. It's doing the much smaller job of existing at the other end of the link, so the forward has somewhere to land. We've argued the general version of this — that a personal page's real audience during a search is three specific people at three specific moments, not an undifferentiated stream of visitors — in the job search you can be found in; the redundancy case is the sharpest version of the referral moment described there, because the network is freshest exactly when you're least prepared to use it.

Say the word

The plainest sentence on the page should say what happened, and it should use the actual word. "I was made redundant from [company] in [month]" does more work than any euphemism you could substitute for it — "between roles," "exploring opportunities," "taking some time" — because everyone reading a job-search page in 2026 already knows what those phrases are covering for, and the cover reads as more anxious than the fact would have. Redundancy is a business decision made about a role, not a verdict on the person who held it, and saying so plainly is what makes that distinction land. Hedging around it does the opposite: it makes a reader wonder what you're not saying, which is a worse position than the truth, whatever the truth is.

Where it goes matters as much as the wording. Near the top, in the same block as what you do and what you're looking for — not buried in an About paragraph three scrolls down, and not made into its own dramatic section. One sentence, stated once, next to the plain statement that you're open to hearing about roles. Anyone reading past that sentence is already past needing an explanation; they want to know what you actually do.

What the afternoon version needs, and nothing else

The mistake people make under this kind of time pressure is building for the wrong audience — a beautifully argued personal narrative, a design philosophy, a case study with three acts, aimed at a hiring manager's unhurried fifteen minutes. That page is worth having eventually. It is not worth having this week, because this week's traffic is a former colleague's forty-second glance before they hit forward, and a forty-second glance never reaches act two.

The version that earns its keep in the first fortnight has four things and nothing more: what you do, in one line specific enough to be useful — "backend engineer, payments infrastructure" carries a forward further than "technology professional" ever will. Proof, which is two or three concrete things you've built or shipped, described in one sentence each rather than a paragraph. A way to reach you that actually works — an email address you check, not a contact form nobody built yet. And the plain redundancy sentence covered above. That's the whole brief. No blog, no long history, no fully worked project archive. Those are real, and they're week-three work, covered below — but none of them change whether the forward happens in week one, and building them first is how the two-week window closes while you're still picking a font.

Getting it live before the window closes

The obstacle most people hit here isn't deciding what to say — it's the gap between deciding and having something online, which for most site builders is measured in weekends, not afternoons. That gap is exactly the problem this moment can't absorb. reach is built for the version of this where the CV already exists and the only thing missing is a page: upload the résumé you already have, along with a photo, answer a short form about the role you want, and it composes a finished one-page site from that CV rather than handing you an empty canvas to fill. The page itself is generated in about twenty seconds, and you can be live at a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes — which means the four-item afternoon version above can be a genuine afternoon, most of it spent deciding what the proof section should say rather than fighting a page builder. A free subdomain is not a downgrade for this purpose; nobody deciding whether to forward your name is checking whether your address ends in your own domain.

Where it will not stretch

The honest limits matter here more than usual, because a redundancy page has to work under pressure with no time to discover them the hard way. It's one page — one index.html, no sub-pages, no site to grow into later without starting over. There's no contact form; the contact section is a mail link and your profile links, not something that posts to an inbox you'd have to go set up. There's no analytics built in, so you will not know who visited or whether the forward you're hoping for actually landed — you'll only find out the way you always find out, which is someone getting back to you. And there's no HTML export, so if you later want the page's markup somewhere else, you can't take it with you; you can only rebuild it. None of that is a defect in what the tool is for. It's a description of a page built to exist fast, not a platform built to grow indefinitely, and knowing that going in means you won't be disappointed by it three weeks from now for not being something it was never trying to be.

What week three is for

Once the initial round of forwarding has already happened — which is most of what a redundancy page can realistically do — the urgency that justified the four-item version starts to fade, and that's the right moment to build out what the afternoon version skipped. A longer version of one of the proof items, written as an actual case study rather than a sentence. A fourth or fifth project, if the work supports it. A sharper answer to the "what are you looking for" line, refined once you've had a few conversations and know which version of the pitch actually lands. If the search runs long enough that a custom domain starts to matter for how the link looks in an email signature, that's also a week-three decision, not a week-one one.

The deeper case for treating your CV and your page as one document rather than two separate maintenance jobs — useful well past the redundancy moment, not just inside it — is in a CV that is itself a URL. And if the redundancy catches you already employed-adjacent, mid-notice-period or weighing whether to look quietly before announcing anything, the version of this same problem for a search you'd rather keep private is covered in job hunting while employed. Neither replaces the first move, though. The first move is smaller than either of those pieces, and it has a closing date: get the plain version live while the people who'd forward you are still thinking about you, and improve it once they already have.